Cisco & Amazon Bring Public Cloud On-Prem

Cisco added another pillar to its multicloud strategy this week by teaming up with Amazon Web Services to allow enterprises to run Kubernetes applications that migrate freely between private clouds and the AWS public cloud.

"Hybrid is the new reality," Kip Compton, Cisco senior vice president, cloud platform and solutions, tells Light Reading. Most enterprises are going to use multiple clouds, with assets on premises that will stay privately run, either because they're difficult to move or because they have to stay out of public clouds for regulatory reasons.

Containers provide portability between applications on premises and in the public cloud, but they can be hard to use. That's where Cisco's partnership with AWS looks to provide a solution, Compton says.

The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS, announced Thursday, is designed to make it easier for enterprises to run production-grade Kubernetes on premises, to manage containerized apps compatible with the AWS public cloud. The software configures on-premises Kubernetes environments to be consistent with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) -- meaning enterprises combine Cisco networking, security, management and monitoring software with AWS cloud services. Users can run the same software on private and public clouds, with common deployment and operational tools, Cisco says. (See Cisco Brings Kubernetes to Hybrid Cloud With Amazon Web Services.)

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The software will be available in next month, both as a software-only solution requiring only the Cisco Container Platform to run, and as a hardware appliance using Cisco Container Platform on Cisco HyperFlex.

"We believe it's important to integrate with the native capabilities in each cloud, such as Amazon EKS. Each cloud is different," Compton says. Cisco's customers "don't want a lowest common denominator approach -- they want a native solution in each cloud." Cisco and its cloud partners provide that, along with common tools and capabilities -- provided by Cisco -- across all the cloud platforms.

The Cisco-AWS service brings security and management for enterprises using Kubernetes and containers with Cisco and AWS, says IDC analyst Stephen Eliot. "It's a nice, complementary fit. They have only scratched the surface for where the partnership can go."

For Cisco, the deal is "another step in supporting multiple clouds," Elliot says. Cisco is extending its own hardware, software and SaaS services into the container and software-defined worlds.

The Cisco-AWS deal has a couple of factors distinguishing it from the blizzard of other partnerships and Kubernetes developments.

"Cisco is talking the public cloud on-prem by integrating the two environments," Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal at ZK Research. That contrasts with VMware's approach, of running VMWare vSphere on AWS. "VMware exports the private cloud stack to AWS," while Cisco and AWS do the opposite, the analyst says.

"So the main difference is Cisco is actually integrating the two environments, instead of trying to extend public to private," as Microsoft does with its Azure Stack, "or private to public," as VMware does by extending to AWS, Kerravala says.

For telcos and service providers, the Cisco AWS deal opens more opportunities to offer solutions to enterprise customers. Service providers can incorporate the Cisco-AWS technology into hosted private cloud offerings, as well as providing managed cloud services to enterprise customers, Compton says.